1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an article distribution system, and to an article distribution method and article distribution program that are used in an article distribution system.
2. Description of the Related Art
In an article contribution/distribution service of a community, contributed articles are displayed in the order of the times of contribution or in the order of higher rating values. Methods of rating each of the articles include a method in which users enter ratings and a method in which ratings are calculated from the number of accesses or number of contributed responses.
Examples of this type of technology are described in the inventions disclosed in JP-A-2003-216563 and JP-A-H11-053387. The “community analysis method and community analysis server” described in JP-A-2003-216563 is a configuration that is able to perform analyses for indicating the transition over time of opinions and responses that relate to opinions and views, by conferring to data from terminal devices attributes that indicate the content of the data and then analyzing the state of the community based on the attributes, the issuers of data, and the time the data were issued.
The “method and system for correlating documents” described in JP-A-H11-053387 is a configuration that can correlate a large volume of articles by calculating the degree of similarity between articles based on the degree of matching of words between articles for a collection of articles that have been ordered in a time series.
However, the above-described examples have several drawbacks. For example, the invention described in JP-A-2003-216563 focuses on conferring attributes to the offered topics, the submitted opinions, and responses to opinions and then analyzing the transition of these attributes, rather than focusing on the keywords contained in data. The invention described in JP-A-H11-053387 has the object of calculating the degree of similarity between articles for the purpose of correlating a large volume of articles. In both of these patent documents, the problem exists that the degree of relevance of articles to readers is not rated for threads.
The present invention was realized in view of the above-described situation and has the object of providing an article distribution system as well as an article distribution method and article distribution program that are used in the system, the system and method being directed to realizing an article contribution/distribution service in which the activity of threads of articles among the users in a community are appraised so as to allow the detection of threads that are active.